Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Saturday, July 26, 2014

Gaza and Israel: It’s As Complicated As It Is Brutal And Simple, With No Answers.

I
deliberately left my last post ‘on top’ for a long time because it sums up
almost all the themes of this blog relating to the Orwellian nature of our tax
surveillance states, and the fallacies of both the common good and the social
contract held by statists of both Left and Tory hues: that post is a précis of
classical liberalism so I hope you might want to read.

That
said, Gaza. On Twitter this morning someone assumed I might want to join this weekend’s
protest march against the Israeli campaign in Gaza. This was my response.

@endarken Why would
you assume I would a) want to be in a march, period b) that particular
march?— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) July
25, 2014

@endarken I hate the
current Israeli campaign in Gaza, but I understand it. And it's way too
complicated for a march. + I take Kundera's 1/2—
Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) July
25, 2014

@endarken ...
approach to protest marchers. Mobs marching with fists raised *are* the evil.
Have a good one though.— Mark Hubbard
(@MarkHubbard33) July
25, 2014

To
expand: the current Israeli operation in Gaza is brutal - as war always is - and
sickening: being the next thing to a pacifist myself, I hate what is happening.
On the other hand, every Islamic neighbour of Israel is on record as wanting
to, quote, ‘obliterate’ Israel, and there are again anti-Semitic marches in
Europe where the neo-Nazi far right are strengthening out of the ruined lives
of dependence from Keynesian, big brother state economic chaos, meaning Israel
has done the simple, ruthless arithmetic and realised if it loses even the
once, there will be a holocaust of WWII scale, not the scale of Gaza. Every
Hamas rocket truly threatens the survival of an entire nation of people. And the important fact here being lost in the fog of emotion in the West, is that Hamas chooses
to keep firing its missiles, and chooses
to fire them from hospitals and schools, and unlike the Israelis does not ring
through fifteen minute warnings, nor set up field hospitals – I’ve seen the pictures
– to treat the wounded of both sides.

Because
Israel cannot afford to lose even once, the mathematics further mean meeting
force with overwhelming force. If the position is taken as many on today’s
protest march do, that the height of supposed Israeli evil is measured by the
difference in body count, well during WWII something over ten times the number
of German civilians were killed by the British bombing raids, than the reverse,
so does your algebra end you up on the British high command of that time being
evil also? Albeit, especially in one of the Israeli sniper incidents I've seen on video, there should certainly be war crimes investigations of some things that are happening in Gaza.

Are
there solutions? No. It’s religion, stupid, we’re not dealing here with an
enlightened, reasoned humanism. In the fundamentalist Islamic vacancies between
the ears of Hamas, Israel is dealing with people who have renounced their
humanity by renouncing their responsibility to think, indeed, whom decapitate,
regularly, those who do.

How
do you plan to encapsulate all that in a protest march?

As
for my tweet reference, that was to the inimitable Milas Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

When she told her French friends
about [why she would not attend a street protest against the communists], they
were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your
country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism,
Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive
evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with
raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would
never be able to make them understand.

I
reckon those fundamentalist blokes in Hamas – sorry to my women readers, but no
equality to be found here – would enjoy a good fist clenching march. To paraphrase this quotation, I would further say that I lied above, there is a solution, being individualism, but the West is moving further away from me being able to make you understand that either. Which is why I say
please count me out of your marches and your boycotts of all you don’t like, it’s
complicated, and I’ve grown up.

(Oh,
and just before the conservatives who read this get all excited, no, my
position on welcoming multi-culturalism and – mutter, spit, cringe – moderate Islam,
hasn’t changed, and I hold to first principles and an open immigration policy.
That position is explained on this post. We won’t break down the unenlightened
nature of that faith below the fundamentalist level by isolating it. Wars are
best won peacefully, where possible, a mind at a time, and I love difference.)

1 comment:

Its politics with a religious facade as it always is. Clearly you have no understanding of how Islam works - there is no moderate Islam as the utterances of the prophet get more brutal with time and the later utterances are preferred to the earlier. Islam has no place in the west - it conflicts with the western democratic mindset by being centered on family, tribe and so on. There is no concept of a greater good and Islam is never going to respect your enlightened secularism.

That doesn't excuse the Zionist movement for their bad behaviour but, as you note, how do you respond to a group whose stated aim is to kill you?

Civilisation is a movement toward privacy, an Orwellian surveillance state the opposite, and tax legislation, especially tax administration, has become the legislation and administration of surveillance and authoritarian rule, in contravention of the rule of law, and common decency. IR

If the Founding Fathers could see how freedom is bound, again, under the iron fist of our taxing authorities; New Zealand's IRD, America's IRS, UK's HMRC, a secret police operating in every country, there would be a Western Spring.

This blog is the only form my protest can take, hoping not to become a squashed blug on the windscreen of state.

Disclaimer: If you pay anything other than the correct amount of tax - as hard as that can be to calculate under our mess of tax law - then you're a bloody idiot. The IR's are all-powerful: they are not a construct of a free, voluntary, civilised classical liberalism, they are a relic of totalitarianism. You have no liberty or privacy from the IR's, you have no legal defence against them, you cannot refuse to be interrogated, you cannot question their actions or seek judicial review holding them to account, even the burden of proof has been turned against the taxpayer; before the law, though you have done nothing wrong, you have less rights than a murderer or rapist, and this Department has been charged by the Fortress of Legislation to systematically eavesdrop and investigate all of us. Don't mess with them. And let me put on record, the IRD staffers I deal with daily are ‘good’ people, I have no complaint whatsoever on a personal/personable level; but this blog is about the principles involved, and it remains my hope there is enough of a classical liberal ethic left, admitting debate and ' difference', that this blog is taken only for the contained - to these pages - protest that it is. For let me spell it out - you, Big Brother State, have won: I.Am.Scared.Of.You.You bet I am. But there's this loon in me that can't seem to shut up. (You're lucky, my poor wife has to live with it).

Copyright

All posts copyright Mark Hubbard and Life Behind the IRon Drape. Contents may be reproduced without permission provided credit is given to the author, it is not altered in any way, the context is made clear and a link is provided to the original.